We're here tonight, and that's enough

It’s cold here in Toronto, bitter and icy and snowing, but it’s not like home. Here it’s heavy and wet and slushy, hard to walk through, easy to slip. Every step made with hesitant and tentative feet. It’s winter, but only a little, and it never quite feels like the winters I know. The bullshit bragging rights I pull all too swiftly from my back pocket, showing off all the bright and shiny baubles of my cold weather bonafides. It’s just that I grew up in the Yukon, and it’s a place I can no longer claim as home due to the scars of the past and the hardships of isolation, and I’m extra sensitive about how living in the biggest city in the country has softened me. Despite how much I like how the city has softened me, I worry that I’m losing something in translation, and so when it gets cold and when the snow falls, I brag a little about how much harder it could all be to hold on to the past that is gone, but alive in my memories.

I only really miss home in the cold months and winter because it reminds me of Christmas, and it reminds me of family and the smell of my moms baking in my parents' kitchen while it's an in-progress affair. In a week or more, Lysh and I will get a box in the mail from my mom, and it will have little things and treasures bundled in Ziploc bags and then again in tinfoil. We will rejoice in the bounty delivered to us, make special coffee to drink with the cookies my mom knows we love, and savour the cinnamon buns she makes once a year. It will be delicious and perfect, but not the same as the smell of it when it’s new, as butter is spun into flour and butterscotch in a Kitchen aid on the counter. The CBC on low on the little stereo on the counter where the phone used to be plugged into the wall, in the days when a phone was a lone machine plugged into a wall. There is no delivery of the past in the box, despite how much we will love all the little things within it and how much they remind me of home. The smell of a memory is just an idea lost to time. But there are still opportunities to recall and live in a perfect vision of the past.

It is the time of year when all our seasonal arguments burrow up from the ground to search for their shadows on the land. If Die Hard belongs in the Christmas canon (yes), is “A Long December” a Christmas song (no, it’s a New Years song, it’s about taking stock at the end of the year), and if Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” is punishment laid upon us for our sins in this life (no, I’ll explain my feelings on the matter).

Many years ago I was an automatic door repair person. That was my job, despite my trade being in glass. Glaziers, which is what we are called, work with glass and aluminum. We install storefronts in buildings, and through that, I learned how automatic doors worked well enough to become adept at their wild and intricate little ways. When I eventually started my construction company in my late-20s, it was to install and repair these kinds of doors. I would eventually be responsible for every automatic door in the Yukon, which meant that I worked nonstop for days on end, and when it was done, I would sleep and wonder why my back felt like it had been replaced by a rope tightened by salt water and time. Winter was a heavy time of year for me because the immense cold and the biting wind of a Yukon winter make doors and people do funny things. This meant a lot of time spent on ladders, my hands in the gears of a motor or chasing faults in wires, my leg holding the door in place so it wouldn’t topple over. Often, I was at a grocery store or the Walmart, and this is where “Wonderful Christmastime” found the peak of its power.

Those same many years ago I redesigned, had engineered, and installed the new entry to the Walmart in Whitehorse, Yukon because that was once my job and my life. I have won literary awards and read at the Harvard Bookstore, and I have also been responsible for the design and implementation of the sliding doors into a Walmart. We all lead strange lives that lead us down unexpected paths. When the time came to do the work, I wasn’t allowed to do it while the store was open, lest someone be injured in all the deconstructing and rebuilding of it all. Each day, I took care of all my regular clients; The Real Canadian Superstore, the recreation centre, and the off-brand Real Canadian Superstore. Come 10 PM, I would arrive at Walmart and work until 8 the next morning. If you’re wondering where I slept in all this, I largely did not. I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and told myself it was only for a few days, and only the one time fell asleep sitting perfectly upright in my truck outside my apartment. My friends' dad, who lived kitty-corner to me, tapped on the window to ask if I was dead and when I rubbed my eyes and looked at him, I don’t think either of us arrived at a solid answer.

There is a moment in exhaustion where nothing can hurt you, where everything feels deliriously alive, and it is perfect. There is no drug I have done that feels the way being awake and mostly sober for 5 days with minimal sleep does. The peaks and valleys and all the in-betweens that strike bones clinging desperately to the skin. Suddenly, everything is funny and profound and beautiful, and this is where I was, in a Walmart every night from 10 pm until 8 am. Joined only by the man I had hired to provide additional labour. Working and sweating and listening to the night-shift staff inside the store restock shelves, wax and buff the floor, and awkwardly flirt with disinterested coworkers.

We had the radio, hidden there in the ceiling above us, endlessly playing a station whose origins we couldn’t place. It sequenced “Hella Good” with “Dónde Está Santa Claus?” Which only sounds hellish because you haven’t heard it like we heard it, our hearts awake and alive and delirious. It played “Jingle Bells” by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters before it arrived at “Smooth” by Rob Thomas and Santana, and it played “Wonderful Christmastime”, Paul McCartney’s strange and beautiful little holiday song.

People hate this song, which I can genuinely understand, despite my feelings that they’re missing out on all the things that make it special. It’s not a good song the way so many of McCartney’s songs are, and it’s not a fun weird song like “Temporary Secretary” is, even though they’re from the same time period. McCartney wrote it while working on 1980s McCartey II, and it feels like the perfect outtake from my favourite era of his post-Wings years. He is credited as playing every instrument on the song, including the jingle bells, and it’s funny to me that a song designed to feel like the backdrop to a holiday party was created alone. As if he too was waiting for a box from home to remind him of all the days long in the rearview.

“Wonderful Christmastime” played every night we worked in that Walmart, more than once, but less than a thousand times. The first time it came on, we hated it, and sang along mockingly. As if we were better than it, up there on our ladders tearing weathered aluminum away from the brick, cleaning it all in preparation of what was to come. It came on when we took breaks to drink coffee, I brought in a giant green Stanley Thermos that promised to keep hot things hot for 24 hours and largely lived up to its brazen promise. We sang and mocked and chided McCartney when the ding-dong ding-dong ding-dong part came on. Then we worked some more and watched the sun rise over the ice fog on the horizon, and wandered exhausted off into the daylight. My helper went home to sleep, and I drove to see my other clients to fix all the problems that arose as the sun and cold weather did.

I love a grocery store in winter because I am from grocery stores too, and it’s a return of sorts for me. I crave order, and ritual, and the reliability of tactile things, which makes for a good addict with bad habits and a fondness for places that will never change. I love how music sounds in a grocery store the same that I love how music sounds in a car when it’s dark and raining, or when it’s sunny on the highway. I love Christmas music in a grocery store because it feels like home, it serves as a comfortable reminder that the days have turned over enough to arrive here at the end of the year and despite all things being wildly unpredictable and at times terrifying, there is order in the aisles of this place. The produce and the bread are still where they have always been, the Ginger Ale has been stacked to look like a Christmas tree, and we are almost done.

As the nights rolled on, our singing along with “Wonderful Christmastime” became less mocking. Suddenly, when we harmonized with him, it was more earnest. We’re here tonight, and that’s enough we sang, and we meant it. We kept each other awake and alive, and the labour of our camaraderie buoyed our exhausted bodies. Suddenly, when the song hadn’t come back around in rotation, somewhere off in the store above the sounds of the night-shift, we wondered where it had gone. This reliable anchor to a place and time. It always came back because it always will, and there’s something warm and safe in knowing that.

When I left the Walmart in the morning to do my other rounds before I lied and said I was going home to finally sleep, the holidays grew ever closer. I was standing on ladders in doorways of grocery stores and smiling politely back at the few faces that cared enough to find something in me worth acknowledging. It is a lonely life on a ladder by a busy door, you are often in the way or considered unclean and unworthy and few see what humanity you still possess, despite exhaustion robbing the life from your eyes. Still, some people would say hello or smile politely, and it was nice to feel reminded I was still alive. Friends and loose acquaintances would arrive with lists clutched in hand, desperate for butter and flour and all the things to mix on a counter, and we would talk a little about the holidays while “Wonderful Christmastime” played on a different radio snuck into a different ceiling, and it felt perfect. The cold wind blowing through the doors, reminding us of the bitter parts of the season that clung to the meat of my bones and remain as cherished memories.

When I had spare moments, enough to rest but not enough to sleep, I would arrive at my parent's house, sit at their counter and drink their coffee and watch my mom bake cookies while we chatted. I could smell the batter forming, and smell them cooking in the oven. I would eat one fresh from the heat, just a little too eager and a little too hot. I would take one more for the road and then disappear again into grocery stores and rec centres and make doors work for the people who needed them. My body moving on muscle memory, driven by wild exhaustion, delirious and happy to be alive somehow despite it all.

“Wonderful Christmastime” is not a perfect song. It might not work on your holiday playlist, or stand proud on a list of beloved classics, but it might be that it’s not a song to be played at home with intention. It is meant, maybe, to be encountered, out there in the world in a ceiling high above us all. It is meant to play in the background of a store, perhaps while you search for butter and flour, or a cardboard box of oranges wrapped in green tissue paper that you know you will never finish despite your best intentions. It is meant to harmonize with the scanning of barcodes and the sliding of doors, a reliable memory of days past and those still to come. The ding-dong ding-dong of it all ringing above your head. It is a gift that I cherish now, when I am at my most wistful and lost in my pining for a home I can never reclaim. It reminds me of the life that I had and that I left behind, and what life is still to come. It is a cherished memory, charming in all its delirious and cheesy moments, of all the faces I knew and the ones that I didn’t, that saw life in me despite my tired eyes.